Touring `Guys And Dolls' Has To Be Ranked With Best

This `Guys And Dolls' Ranks With The Best

September 16, 1992|By MALCOLM JOHNSON; Courant Theater Critic

Luck is a lady for the Bushnell this week as the smash revival of "Guys and Dolls" winningly opens its national tour in Hartford. Or perhaps it is the spirit of William H. Mortensen smiling down on a musical from his heyday as the impresario of the hall newly renamed in his memory.

The road show directed by Jerry Zaks and designed by Tony Walton and William Ivey Long that began its run at the Bushnell Tuesday night looks and feels much the same as the one created by the same team that is pulling customers into New York's Martin Beck Theatre at an astonishing rate.

As a Broadway revival, Zaks' flashy, jokey, colorful production has everything but tenderness. The romantic aspects of the Frank Loesser-Jo Swerling-Abe Burrows adaptation of Damon Runyon are not wafting through the Mortensen Hall either; neither love story ever tugs the heartstrings for more than a moment or so. But as touring Broadway shows go, this one ranks with the very best.

Without question, "Guys and Dolls" remains one of the treasures of the American musical theater. As a self-styled "musical fable of Broadway," with its wise guy gamblers, insouciant song-and-dance ladies and righteous missionaries, it can never become dated. Almost to the end, when it takes awkward narrative leaps to arrive at a double wedding, the book by Swerling and Burrows carries the show forward seamlessly. And Loesser's songs, standards and cult favorites, define the characters in words and music.

The Broadway milieu, originally stylized for the stage by Jo Mielziner, offers a designer a yeasty palette of light and color, and the current designers have indulged themselves in an astigmatic riot of bright hues. This is Broadway as it never was, with oranges and pinks and electric blues glowing in Walton's sets, and even more brazen colors blazing in the costumes by Long. Lt. Brannigan spots a canary-yellow fedora and trench coat, for example -- with more pop-art glow than Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy.

The full-color comic section of the Runyon era gives Zaks' "Guys and Dolls" its zeitgeist, but the characters are something

else again. From the first, Sky Masterson loomed almost mythically in the Broadway night, while Nathan Detroit figured as the very heart of the grifting, yet good-hearted, Broadway of yore.

In Richard Muenz, who has been working through the Broadway canon for years, the road show has one of the most true blue of Skys, virile and wolfishly scowling like Brando in the movie, yet able to sing "My Time of Day" with rare musical accuracy. He easily outclasses Peter Gallagher in the current Broadway version. And Lewis J. Stadlen takes Nathan back to Sam Levene, with touches of one of his past roles, as the young Groucho Marx. His maturity makes him more deeply convincing than the delightfully clowning, but too-boyish Nathan Lane.

Although not as razor sharp as the Tony Award-winning Faith Prince, Lorna Luft lends heart, a little chorine clunkiness and occasional potent vocal flights of her mother, Judy Garland, to Nathan's long-suffering fiancee, Miss Adelaide. And although she does not become as deliciously bibulous as Josie de Guzman on Broadway, Patrica Ben Peterson rings bells as Miss Sarah Brown falls from her prim heights in Havana.

But the big crowd-pleasers come late in the second act, when milk-faced, innocent Kevin Ligon sways on a table top in "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat," and when the ensemble surges and somersaults through "The Crapshooter's Dance." In these great musical-theater moments, Loesser is more alive than ever.

"Guys and Dolls" continues through Sunday at the Bushnell. Performances are today through Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at 2 and 8 p.m. Tickets: $24.50 to $47.50. Box office: 246-6807, or Ticketmaster, 525-4500 or 624-0033.

Stage review

GUYS AND DOLLS, Music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, based on a story and characters by Damon Runyon; directed by Jerry Zaks; choreographed by Christopher Chadman; scenery designed by Tony Walton; costumes designed by William Ivey Long; lighting designed by Paul Gallo; music supervision by Edward Strauss; dance music by Mark Hummel; sound design by Tony Meola; orchestrations by George Bassman, Ted Royal and Michael Starobin; musical director, Randy Booth. Presented by Dodger Productions, Roger Berlind, Jujamcyn Theaters/TV ASAHI, Kardana Productions, The John F. Kennedy for the Performing Arts at the William H. Mortensen Hall of the Bushnell, Douglas Evans, managing director.